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SURVIVAL CITY OR REVIVAL CITY?

Thorncliffe Park, Toronto

The elevator journey remains a strange and slightly disturbing experience for Adinah Heqosah, even after several months. She prefers the stairs. Today, as she heads out to buy meat at Iqbal’s, her husband, Hillal, joins her, places his hand gently over hers, and guides her fingers to the buttons. Until she moved into this ninth-floor apartment a few months before, her only experience with electricity was the bare incandescent bulb that illuminated their mud-and-sand enclosure, casting its pale beams through the house and into the basement pit beneath the kitchen where the large animals slept. Today, in this dense high-rise neighborhood on the other side of the earth, checkout terminals, cash machines, and city buses remain intimidating.

Iqbal’s market, on the other hand, is a comfort. The heavy sacks of rice and grain on the floor and the racks of raw spices in the big fluorescent-lit shop remind Adinah of home, and familiar phrases of the Dari tongue are often heard in the aisles. She and her husband both come here frequently. Hillal has learned enough English to get by in the city, but Adinah is only in beginner classes at the neighborhood center and sticks to the familiar streets of Thorncliffe Park, where nearly everyone’s an Asian villager. Her seven children are fast becoming fluent in a language she barely understands. They demand pizza rather than pilau and won’t attend mosque; they talk of moving out when they turn 18, a North American custom the parents don’t appreciate.

Hillal, at least, had experience living in a city. There had been only four houses in the village of Varna, near the Tajik border in the far northeast of Afghanistan, when he was a child there in the late 1960s. After years working seasonally in Peshawar, Kabul, and Tajikistan, he returned to Varna to marry Adinah in 1990. By then, there were 15 houses, surrounded by dust and grit. By 2001, when warring Taliban factions had turned the village into a menacing place and they were forced to flee overseas, Adinah had never lived anywhere else. But Hillal had heard, from friends in Kabul, of a place on the edge of a city called Toronto. After fleeing to Tajikistan and Pakistan, they made an urban move across the ocean.

Adinah and Hillal make their way awkwardly, in snow boots, along the oval boulevard that forms the center of Thorncliffe Park, a forest of postwar apartments and one-story shopping plazas. This neighborhood, easily accessible to the downtown core, was built on a former horse-race track beside a well-treed ravine on the far fringe of Toronto, initially for soldiers returning from the Second World War. Adinah adjusts her headscarf as they cross the broad parking lot of Iqbal’s, whose kebab counter is packed with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Indians. Among the rice bags, Adinah is stopped by a 30-year-old woman named Maryam Formuli, a fellow Dari speaker, who arrived here from Peshawar just a few weeks earlier. Maryam, a younger, childless woman, who had learned decent English in Kabul, has been hanging around the shop, nervously approaching fellow Afghanis. She greets Adinah warmly and asks if they can talk.

Maryam explains that she has lived for a month here in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother, her brother, his wife, and their three children—a conventional arrangement in Thorncliffe Park, where the Afghani families typically fill the living room with a large Persian rug, a periphery of cushions, and a couple of endlessly refilled tea urns, the family sleeping on the floor in the bedrooms. Maryam has been unable to get her husband into Canada. “Your husband is here?” she asks in a disarmingly abrupt fashion. “How did he come here?” They agree to have tea. The Afghani network is beginning to form. Adinah envies the Pakistanis and Indians, who have taken over multiple floors of her building, replicating whole villages in the vertical plane, and seem able to use their connections,